Kapital is our personal finance manager package for KDE and Linux. It is meant to be in the spirit of Intuit Quicken or Microsoft Money, but without the bloat associated with those packages from years of justifying upgrades. Kapital has everything you need for managing all your personal finances. Kapital has been tested with various other window managers including GNOME, and will work with them, however our area of focus and support is currently KDE.
[Ed: This is commercial software, see below for price info.]

Kapital features include:

Check register for entering and clearing various types of transactions such as checks, deposits, ATM, EFT, etc.

Calendar for setting up scheduled payments, used in conjunction with a "Bill Tracker" alarm to let you know that bills are coming due.

Check and report printing, including graphics and logos.

Basic and advanced searching capabilities and online reporting as well as charts and graphs.

Predefined categories for transactions. Include sub-categories, and the ability for users to create and delete new categories.

New account wizard that goes through various types of budget scenarios like Single, Married, Married with Children, Single with Children, etc.

Import/Export features for Quicken QIF file format.

Budget Tracker. The user sets up a budget for various items, and alarms can sound when you come within a threshold, or exceed it for defined time periods, typically a calendar month. This would usually happen when you are entering a new transaction into a category and the amount causes it to exceed the threshold. You can also do charts, graphs and reports that show where you are in the time period for your budget so you can see if you are ahead, behind, or spot on.

Check Designer. This feature is very much in development, but you will be able to use a web page to design your own checks and then have them delivered to you as you would with any third party check printing company.

Create any type of account to manage. This can be a checking account, savings account, stock, investment, retirement, etc.

Online Banking. As we develop partnerships with financial institutions you will get to take more and more advantage of online banking -- with the ultimate goal of having the ability of paying your bills and sending money between various types of accounts all from your desktop.

What do you want to see? Let us know and we'll make your dreams a reality.

The initial release of Kapital will be available as a download by the end of February 2001. As soon as the enhancement requests dwindle to a trickle, we will then burn the CD packages and send the final product to everyone. You will still be able to download free updates until September thus protecting your initial investment for some time.

In consideration for early adopters of Kapital we will be extending a discount on all sales made prior to the actual availability date. Pricing follows for the Standard Edition:

Purchasers of Kapital will be entitled to free electronic updates through September 1, 2001.

A Kapital mailing list for customers will be available as well as support queues. We will answer these support questions as time permits,
for priority response you should take a look at our support services.

Comments

Personaly, though, if I was the Kompany, I'd be trying to convince Distro packagers why they need it in their comercial distros... As its hard just to find a copy of linux at most stores, yet alone linux apps...

My first reaction was a violent one to the idea of running anything but open source on my machine. But upon more consternation, I believe this is a very good thing. But lets see how good support for variants of Linux and Unix is with a commercial product from the Kompany, any commercial company is going to have to run hard to keep up with the platforms and quality of the KDE team.

I will be the first in line to buy a copy of this for my Solaris on SPARC hardware.

This was simply meant to be a heads-up to KDE/Linux users expecting a free download. I clarified the remark, although obviously more informed ones like you don't really need such information.

Meanwhile, congrats to theKompany.com for filling in the void in the Linux market with a product of this sort! I hope they manage to market their product to the rest of the Linux world. This is the kind of software comp.os.linux.advocacy used to scream for all the time. Even CmdrTaco has been salivating for such software, IIRC.

Right now we are on track to have a first beta of Rekall the beginning of March. We are working on getting the web pages together right now, hopefully they will be up in another week.

There will be two versions of Rekall, one will be free and have limited functionality, we haven't decided how it will be limited. We want it to be useful for a certain category of use. The commercial version, which can be seen as a database centric development environment like Access (but better :)), will cost somewhere between $30 and $50, we are still working it out.

What ReKall should have IMHO opinion, is a whole set of builders and Wizards, which will enable me to create a small/medium database within minutes after defining the tables. THAT is the advantage that Access has: Really QUICK database application development. If ReKall can do that, you have my vote ( Then I might even convince the Greek L.U.G. to distribute the free edition inside Linux CDs that will be given to IT students in a large number(thousands) of Computer Schools, later this year)

Once again they have done it ,and i am really looking forward to buying this.
However I would love to see them include a version for my PDA (Palm) that i could use to syncronize and keep my info uptodate while i am
away from my system

(This mainly for the budget tracker/planner and payment reminders).

I also hope that they do some intregration with Koffice (i can see it with kspread)and allow for html formatting/publishing ,it also goes without saying that it should intregrate with konqueror.
Also I would love to also see it secure with the ability to lock and encrypt records on a per-user
basis.
Once again let me say congrats and thanks

P.s.
And now this for the KDE developers out it would be cool if i could RMB click on a file and directory and encrypt them (new password or global session password independent of the users system passwd). Also what happened to the idea of using compression on files in the recycle bin?, hope i didn't imagine it. It would be cool to make it smart and not compress files with extension *.bz2 *.zip *.tar....etc (i guess that this is better if user definable along with max trash size and purge threshold [oldest files first]).
Hope i didn't waste your time with unnecessary info.
-kbee

See this is my real problem, I'm fine with paying for good software, but how is this going to play with Koffice, and so forth. We have seen how The Kompany hasn't made much of an attempt to intergrate the Magellan with the rest of kde, I think that with KDE it is important for it's builtin modules to be used as much as possilbe, which the Kompany does do. Since they are not GNU they have to remake all the modules that KDE already has made.

We are currently working on a full rewrite of the Aethera UI into KParts, which is almost done. One of the disagreements we had with magellan originally is that we wanted it to be part of KOffice and they didn't.

The sad truth is that I don't have unlimited resources to do everything that I want at the same time, so some of my dreams take a little longer to realize than others. Good things come to those you wait :).

What is the relation (similarity/difference) between Empath and Aethera?. AFAIK Empath wanted to be a fully component based system. Making Aethera a parts based system sounds to me similar to Empath. Since both are opensource and KDE apps, shouldn't there be some exchange of code and ideas between the two?

I've spoken with Rik a number of times about this, but neither one of us has had a lot of time to really get into it. We should probably have a conference between the various groups to see what might make sense. Thanks for reminding me :)

Kapital supports a variety of monetary formats, so in that regard german will be supported. We'll be testing various localizations once the code is tested a bit more. Having programmers in a bunch of different countries makes that a lot easier to test :).

This is great news Shawn. One question I do have is: what theme are you guys using for the screenshots? It looks really slick and professional.

Another question I do have is how you are planning your distribution of your products. I am in the UK, and it would be great to order your products over here, or even see them in the shops. Any news on this?

That was just the default color theme, the art work is ours. I'm glad you like the look.

Funny you should ask about UK distribution. I'm currently in discussions with a UK distributor right now. They are likely to carry PowerPlant and BlackAdder at the moment, so I'm sure getting them to carry Kapital won't be a problem.

Ahhh, I assume the screenshot was taken at a high resoloution as the menu's seem nice and compact. I like this look. The artwork is indeed very nice, and it puts a nice professional shine on the package.

As for the UK distribution, I hope something good comes out of it. I firmly believe you have a good business model, and although there are some flamers about close sourcing (which is inevitable in the business world), I hope you make some good money. The flamers will stop complaining when it brings more users to KDE.

Here's a tip for theKompany to become REALLY popular among most KDE users: Join efforts with Faure, Montel and the guys and work on KWord! Everybody needs a good word processor and KDE needs a good word processor to hit it big-time, which, in turn, means a broader user base for other theKompany products.

The deal was between us and Kawail. They would find and house the programmers, and we would pay for them. The last I heard from Kawail was that they finally found someone back in December, but only one. We both looked at a lot of resumes, but no one fit the bill.

Another issue has been all the changes being made in Qt for the rich text widget. One of the things we were going to work on was support for languages like Thai, and that appeared to be directly supported with the new widgets, so instead of doing unnecessary work, we needed to see if that was going to solve the problems or night. I haven't gotten a status from Kawail in a bit, so I don't know the current state. We've been very busy getting out our other products lately.

Shawn, check out koffice-devel (mailing list) and you'll probably find guys suited for the job. Some of the talented guys there are working on KWord in their spare time, but could probably contribute a lot more if it payed the bills. Frankly, KWord is in desperate need of developers, check out how many cvs commits there have been during the last six months.

The idea was they would be Thai programmers, and would physically be at the Kawail facility. As it turns out, it is hard to find Thai programmers.

I know KWord needs help, and I have conversations about it at least once a week. KSpread needs help too and so do a lot of things. I already get accused of being spread too thin. It's all important to do, but it can't all be done at once.

Excellent work theKompany, it is not something I need but I'm sure there's a market for it.I for one support pay-ware/proprietatery on linux, as long as they're giving back to the community in other projects, and we all know TK does that. We need good end-user apps and we need them fast.

Thanks for the tip on HBCI, we've been getting a ton of requests for a native German version of Kapital as well. I've just started to look at the HBCI site, and it's pretty terrible in terms of providing information since it is mixed between german and english, however we have some german folks on staff so we should be able to get it localized and tested with HBCI. We'll announce it once we have the OFX, HBCI and MBANX support worked out.

Does theKompany plan to release any open source software one of these days?

If I remember correctly, theKompany was supposed to be the KDE answer to the Gnome foundation. So far, I haven't heard of the Gnome foundation releasing any commercial software at all. Even the stuff developped by paid programmers like Evolution or OpenOffice is available under the GPL.

May be I'm just paranoid, but I have that nasty feeling that the KDE camp is developping killer apps but releases them as commercial packages (aerethra being the exception, due to the fact that is was based on the Magellan source code which was under an open source licence).

Oh well...I guess I'll keep using GnuCash under KDE 2.1. And I may even give gnome 1.4 a try, after all.

Excuse me, but your comment is a bit off putting. All we've done for the last year is release free and open software, we are just finally getting to some commercial applications. Please visit www.thekompany.com/projects for an extensive list of the free and open projects we've done.

In addition, who ever said we were the answer to the Gnome Foundation? That doesn't even make sense, that would mean that we would be a governing board over what goes into KDE, which I'm sure none of you want, and neither do I.

If we give away our work, then how will we make money to do more work? And let me clarify Aethera. The license of Magellan specifically allowed us to close source it if we so chose. We went the other way and put a GPL license on it.

You and I both know that your not going to run off and install gnome, so why do you make those comments? simply to be inflammatory I imagine.

you can be sure that plenty 'killer apps' will continue to become available for kde under the gpl (there a lot of talented people that would see to that:)
theKompany is trying to make a buck. let 'em. you keep using and enjoying free software within kde. there is no danger.

you can be sure that plenty 'killer apps' will continue to become available for kde under the gpl (there a lot of talented people that would see to that:)
theKompany is trying to make a buck. let 'em. you keep using and enjoying free software within kde. there is no danger.